Star Vs the House of Leaves
by Darkmoose84
Summary: For the Halloween season, Star and Marco go on an urban exploration to the Navidson house. Confusing and disillusionment set in as they traverse the growing house and the maze underneath it. Loose crossover with the Mark Danielewski novel.


"Don't cry\There's always a way\Here in November, in this House of Leaves we'll pray\Please, I know it's hard to believe\To see a perfect forest\Through so many splintered trees\You and me and these shadows keep on changing\And I'm haunted\By the lives that I have loved\And actions I have hated\I'm haunted\By the promises I've made\And others I have broken..." – Anne "Poe" Danielewski

Virginia, United States, October 30th, 2016

A portal opened in the woods just outside of Richmond. One might have mistaken it for the Leesylvania woodland preserve, but supposedly, there were plenty of other housing within the area. And that's exactly the fact on which Marco was relying as he hopped through the portal back to the Earth realm. Star followed close behind him, her quirky looking purple boots crunching the brown, red, and yellow leaves beneath her.

"So, my great 'Squire of Fun Times,'" Star chided, "What sort of spooky adventure are we going on before we celebrate your world's Halloween holiday?"

"Thought I'd take a different approach with some urban exploration," Marco slyly answered, waving a GoPro camera around him and Star, "I wondered what it might be like to walk through a potentially haunted house."

"And given that you used the scissors to get here," Star mused, "it seems like you might already have a place in mind.

"Actually, I do," Marco turned the camera to her, "It's based on this case file I got from that weird Dipper Pines guy we met last summer. Best haunted house story if I've ever heard one. Supposedly, the Navidson house is around this area. You wanted magic beyond Mewni? This is it. This is a cursed house that keeps growing and seems to have a mind of its own."

"Sometimes I wonder if our castle has a mind of its own," Star laughed.

"But, yeah," Marco continued to explain while panning the camera around the woods, the dead trees still holding some of the warm colored leaves on their near bare branches, "There's supposedly some obscure documentary out there, that I might add is near impossible to find, called 'The Navidson Record' where this photographer, along with his wife, kids, and some other dudes venture into this new house and find that hallways start growing in it. Eventually they find that there's a whole maze growing underneath the house, even some strange entity they labeled a minotaur, though it's not really a minotaur but something they couldn't describe, let alone capture on their cameras."

"Real minotaurs aren't even that mean if you stay on their good side," Star commented, "I had one living in the old wand, and he was one of the nicest creatures I had with me."

"But that's the thing," Marco replied, "It was...something else...something much worse than they could have imagined..." He changed the subject. "Speaking of which, how are your spells going without the wand?"

"Surprisingly, not that bad," Star smiled as she generated a rainbow ball in her hand that Marco was more than eager to film, "I've been practicing this whole 'Dipping Down' bit where I can just make magic on my own without a wand. I just draw from base emotion and POOF, I have it." She juggled the glowing rainbow ball for a moment or two before it caught fire, forcing her to drop it and snuff it with her boot. "I still haven't perfected the rainbows not catching on fire part. Festivia knew a spell for that...but I spilled glitter on it."

"Eh, so it goes," Marco shrugged, "How are you and Tom doing?"

"Ugh, Marco," Star groaned while pushing him and causing the camera to stagger its picture backwards, "Are you the king of asking awkward questions today? We're...we're both trying to move on..."

"I...uh..." the camera picks up Marco muttering.

"And you're partially to thank for that," Star growled, "After you told him about the photo booth kiss...Well, I hope he and Janna are having a good time together..."

"I..." Marco stammered again, "Sorry about that. I just felt like he needed to know the truth."

"You're right," Star responded with some hesitation, "He did. It wouldn't have been right to lie to him. Anyways, where's this house you mentioned?"

"Well, these are the coordinates for where it's supposed to be," Marco wondered, "But it doesn't look like it's here."

"Maybe your aim was off a bit with the scissors?" Star also wondered.

"Not that off," Marco replied, "Maybe we should walk around a little bit and see if it's around here?"

"Wouldn't mind a walk in the woods with my best friend," Star chimed and began skipping through the leaves.

"Yeah..." Marco responded and then lowered his voice, "...best friend. That's what I am..."

The two walked for about a half hour, admiring the dormant trees and the multicolored leaves upon them. The sun streamed down through the branches, its red and gold rays shooting through the leaves and dancing upon the ground below them. In passing by one of the trees, Star noticed one of them had what looked like some old Polaroid camera pictures taped to it. She walked over and examined them, finding that one was the image of some old house, while another looked like it was of a page in an old book of Greek mythology with the image of a minotaur in the center, while yet another looked like it was taken of an old map, the design of a strange maze scrolled across it.

"Well, this is a creative place to put photos," Star mused.

"The words I'd use are odd and creepy," Marco said.

"Let's keep walking," Star replied. And the two walked a little further. They looked all around them, hoping to catch a glimpse of the house, wherever it could be. It wasn't long before Star found a familiar sight: it was the same tree with the pictures taped to it.

"Uhhh, Marco," Star muttered in that same comical tone she had when she was confused, "Did we just go in a circle?"

"Couldn't have," Marco replied, "We've been walking straight ahead for almost an hour now."

"Either this is a different tree," Star narrowed her eyes, "or we both could've gone mad. The madness abounds here."

"But, Star," Marco muttered, "I think we found it." He then pointed off behind them, and sure enough was the same nigh dilapidated house. "Was it always there, and we just didn't see it?"

"I dunno," Star cocked her head to the side in confusion, "I'm just wondering about the whole walked straight and went around in a circle thing happened."

"Let's check it out," Marco said. And the two moved towards the house. The paint was falling off the walls and door, chipped and peeling after 20 years of neglect. The door was slightly ajar, so Marco simply pushed it open, giving the expected creak on its hinges. Just inside was the main living room, including an old couch, a dusty 51 inch CRT Toshiba television, a small door, a ripped carpeted stairway leading upward, and a passage to the moldy kitchen.

As the two made their way into the house, they noticed the floor was covered in leaves. Occasionally, they spotted a few objects among the fallen foliage, including a child's toy, an old TV guide from 1996, and an old plastic canister of Fuji film. There was a sense of heaviness in the air, a suffocation of fear and anguish from a bygone time four years before either of them were born.

"Marco," Star's shivering tone reminded him of whenever she would discuss her nightmares, Hungry Larry, or Toffee's corrupted magic form, "What happened here? I...don't feel right here. Not good vibes, Marco. Not good at all."

"The house itself wasn't meant for people," Marco shuttered at his own feelings, "Navidson and his family escaped the house's wrath, but not without losing an arm. One of his friends died in the maze of a basement during their exploration. Then another explorer died of unexplained causes two years later while writing an essay on the supposed 'found-footage' film they made from it."

"Then why are we exploring it?"

"I didn't really believe a lot of this," Marco answered, "as there's no proof the film exists besides this second memoir that this crazy Johnny Truant guy. But now that we're here, I'm starting to wonder. Maybe the house has a mind of its own, and it wanted us to find it, trapping us in some loop back there."

"Terrible thought there, my naive squire," Star was trying to give a humorous tone, but it was failing as the awful feeling wouldn't leave her.

"But there's the door," Marco pointed to the small door on the opposite wall, "That's supposedly the closet that grew out of the wall and then turned into what they called the 'Five and a Half Minute Hallway.' Do we dare."

"You know what?" Star asked rhetorically, composing herself and shaking off the terribile thoughts, "We dare. We've been through world-ending scrapes before. What's an old haunted house compared to what we've overcome?"

"And anytime we need," Marco continued, "We can just use the scissors to get us back to Butterfly Castle."

"Good thinking, squire," Star smiled, "Always clever with those exit strategies."

They opened the door, and Star poked her head through it. Sure enough, there was what might have been a closet at first, but it curved off to the right which lead to a long hallway that seemed to stretch on forever. She then looked out back through the living room and saw that this could not have been physically possible, considering the stairway should have stopped it.

"Marco, poke your head in," Star ordered. He followed suit and saw the dark hallway stretching on seemingly forever. He then removed his head from the doorway and looked at the stairs.

"Huh," Marco mused, "Well, I'm amazed."

"This kind of reminds me," Star remembered, "of that weird structure Sabrina kept stumbling through on that field trip we we went on two years ago."

"Well, shall we go in?"

"Let no Mewman say we were cowards," Star chuckled. The two then walked through the open door and into the hallway of the unknown, Marco lighting the flashlight he brought with him. There were no overhead lights; the hallway did not reveal any of its blackened, secret corners beyond what the electric torch touched.

Sure enough, it took them roughly five minutes to walk down the long hallway. Marco turned the flashlight back behind Star to try and see if they could see where they came in, but this was in vain. The door in which they entered had long disappeared behind them.

"Huh," Marco resolved with some nervousness in his voice, "Figures I guess."

"Remember, my constantly skittish Marco," Star reminded him, "Keep those scissors at the ready."

The two continued down the dimension-defying hallway until they found it took a sharp turn down yet another long hallway. This one only took one minute for them to traverse before it took another sharp turn, only for them to find yet another sharp turn then another then another.

Right.

Left.

Right.

Left.

This strange hallway snaked around for some time to the point where it began to disorientate the two adventurers, their minds twisting this way and that to keep up with the winding path. They felt like they could pass out from how dizzy it was making them before they had to stop themselves in front of a long, spiral staircase.

"Whoa!" Marco yelped, "Almost fell over there."

"Ugh," Star groaned, "As if I wasn't dizzy enough. This is like the dizzy dimension of dizzy-dizzying."

The two proceeded down the stairs, spinning downward for what felt like another long time; they stopped counting the minutes some time ago. They decided to quicken their pace, hoping to get through it faster, racing down the steps and hoping, praying that God/The Stump would be merciful enough to grant them a landing.

As they made their way down, Star needed something to distract her, so she looked at Marco and began to think about all those uncomfortable things that she wanted to say but knew she shouldn't. She and Tom were no longer a thing, and clearly neither were he and Jackie. How long a time should she be outside of a relationship before she was going to say how she really felt and how this was what she had wanted all along? No, it wasn't the right time. She still had so much that needed to happen in the Butterfly Kingdom before she could. She needed to be a better princess...but was she still a princess? Either way, there was a lot left unsettled. But was that really and excuse; why couldn't she and Marco be each others romantic comfort through it all? This confusion made her just as disoriented as the maze in which they now found themselves.

Maybe this maze was really a reflection of her own jumbled mind.

Finally that prayer was answered when they came across a flat surface that was the floor of a new hallway, one they thought they would never see again.

"Oh great flat flooring!" Star fell to her knees and started kissing the floor, "I missed you so much."

"Uuuugh, thank Karate," Marco moaned, "No more steps."

"Let's keep going, Marco," Star chirped, "Gotta find out what makes this place tick." They walked a few paces before Marco got a weird feeling. There had to be something behind him, something watching them. Perhaps it had always been there, even when they landed in the Virginia forest. He spun around, turning his flashlight on whatever it could be, only to find that a wall had generated where the staircase used to be. But this left absolutely no impact on him; it was almost as if he expected this to happen.

"I knew it," Marco sighed, "I knew this was going to happen. It doesn't want us to leave."

"Oh, Marco," Star grumbled, "You're panicking over nothing."

"But what if the scissors don't work, Star," Marco's agitation of spirit was evident in his voice, "Since this place can bend space and time at its will, what if it can bend the scissors portal to wherever it wants us to go?"

"That's a little extreme, don't you thing?" Star shook her head, "And you talk about this place as though it has a mind of its own. It's just a weird, creepy house that keeps shifting, nothing more." There was a moment of silence between them for a moment, both of them lost in apprehension. What if Marco's paranoia was correct, and this place was indeed alive? Finally, Star spoke again. "Do you want to leave now? Call it a day?"

"...No," Marco exhaled softly, "I can't say I'm fully satisfied with just some winding hallways and stairs that go on forever. We've been to other dimensions that were stranger than this. I'm...I'm almost kind of hoping we run into something creepy here."

Just then, they looked down the opposite hallway and found that it was lined with doors.

"Maybe you'll still get your wish," Star shuttered while trying to keep that confident demeanor she had earlier. The two then proceeded down and tried each door, only to unfortunately find each one locked. They then eventually came across one that looked to be slightly ajar, and on the door was a plaque.

The plaque had embedded plastic letters that read, "Hello, my name is..." and under it was what looked like crudely painted red scribbles that ultimately said, "JoHnNy'S MoMmYyyyy..." before it trailed downward and off the plaque's panel.

"Johnny..." Star mused, "Isn't that the guy who you said wrote some big long essay about that weird film about this house?"

"Could be," Marco said even more nervously than earlier, "There's a lot of people named Johnny. But his mother died in a mental hospital in the early 2000's."

"Well, let's go in and find your Halloween creeps, my dear squire," Star smile, still perky in the face of unknown dread.

The adventurers opened the door and shined the light in the room. It was a large room, full of what looked like large steel hospital tables. The looked around the cold, stiflingly putrid smelling room until they found a figure in the corner. It was clearly a woman, much older and still taller than them. Perhaps, she was a bit taller than Queen Moon. For a moment, Star thought of her mother and wonder where she could still possibly be; she hoped with all her being that she wasn't trapped in this Stump forsaken house somewhere. The woman's hair was some horrendous mat that snaked outward in a shaggy rugged formation, and Star wondered when the last time she had washed it could have been. Possibly the early 2000's as Marco had mentioned.

"Hello...miss…?" Star vocalized sheepishly.

"Star, don't talk to her…please," Marco shuddered as he spoke, "She's psycho. You can't talk to a psycho like a normal human being."

"Hush, Marco," Star gave a quick snap before turning back to the woman who still had her face turned to the wall, "Miss...if you're...if you're in any trouble we can-"

Just as she said this, the woman turned to face her. Her eyes were black, her mouth opened an unnatural length, and she

SCREAMED!

Star could only react. She raised her hand a launched several magic missiles from her palm, all of which passed through the woman and hit the wall behind her. Her spells worked on ghosts in the past, so why didn't these? The woman then began running towards them, forcing Star and Marco to run for their lives towards the open door. The teens scrambled and fell on their backs in the hallway, finding that all the doors were now wide open, and all of them holding the mirror image of the elongated-faced woman who now screamed in surround stereo from each of the rooms, echoing down the halls. All they could do was hold each other as the sound of screaming droned on and on through the endless hallway.

All of a sudden, the screaming of the long departed had ended. Star and Marco looked up to see that now, all the doors were slamming shut.

One.

After.

Another.

After.

Another.

But no sooner had this ended then they heard some horrendous sound at the end of the darkness where the stairs used to be. The two stood, their arms still holding each other, neither of them wanting to part from the other as they listened to the horrendous din. There was some gelatinous, guttural groaning sound at then end of the hallway, and something was moving in the dark, though Star couldn't see it. It was some force she couldn't perceive, though Marco could see it plain as day, and he froze at gazing upon it.

"Marco, I think it's time to use the scissors," Star whispered to him, "Marco…?"

But he fell from her arms and writhed on the ground, foam forming from his mouth as he twitched and convulsed.

Whatever Marco had seen in that instance in the dark destroyed whatever sanity he had left in one fell swoop.

"Lemon meringue laser!" Star cried out as she shot a yellow and green bolt from her hand into the darkness. It was completely ineffective, but for a moment, Star thought it illuminated the force long enough for her to see some indescribable groping, twitching shapes moving towards them.

She dropped down with him to try and reach through his hoodie pockets for the scissors, all in a desperate attempt for life. The droning force moved closer and closer to them as Star fumbled through Marco's pockets, and his spasms were not helping in the slightest. Finally, at last, she was able to grab the scissors, cut open a portal, and pull her lame squire through the portal with her before the roaming force crashed into them.

The two now found themselves safe on the outer edge of the Forest of Certain Death, having landed in a pile of red and brown leaves. Star held Marco in her arms until he finally fell calm, his eyes closing as he drifted out of consciousness.

"Oh, my poor Marco," Star whimpered, holding the boy close to her, "I'm so sorry. I think we bit off more than we could chew on this one." She continued to hold the passed out boy until a caravan of Butterfly Kingdom knights traveled by them. Star flagged them down, and the group loaded them into their wagon back to the castle. Unsurprisingly, she realized they left the GoPro camera in the house when they fell back into the hallway. Just as well; it wasn't exactly a memory they wanted to keep anyway.

A day passed, and Marco had fully recovered. When Star heard the news, she ran down the hall to his room and practically kicked the door down.

"Marco!" she shouted as she entered, Marco, Tom, and Janna all there in the room staring at her erratic behavior, "Are you okay?"

"Star, I'm fine," Marco answered her calmly, "There's nothing to worry about. I was only a little sick, that's all."

"Oh thank goodness," she put her hand on his shoulder as he sat up in his bed, "I was so worried you'd be completely traumatized after our last adventure."

"What adventure?"

"You know!" Star stammered in confusion, "The Navidson House!"

"Oh...yeah..." Marco paused in equal confusion, "We did go there didn't we?"

"Yeah, we did, Marco!" Star was now getting slightly frustrated, "And you saw something in the dark before you ended up here. What was it you saw?"

There was an uncomfortable silence as his brown eyes stared into her blue eyes. After a moment, Marco started to laugh. He laughed for a long, unsettling time, and no one knew how to react. Eventually, Janna and Tom started to laugh with him, and not knowing what else to do, Star joined the hysterical laughter herself.

Finally, they all stopped in unison. Star and Marco wiped a tear from each others eyes.

"It's all okay now, Marco," Star smiled, "Whatever happened, it doesn't matter now. Now, get out of bed! We've got some cider to drink, some candy to eat, and some of Janna's best horror movies to watch."


End file.
